Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms

Social Forms: Lecture VII

Lecture VII

Dornach, August 21, 1920

Genuine
knowledge of the impulses holding sway in humanity, knowledge
that must be acquired if we wish to take a Position in life
in any direction, is possible only if we attempt to go deeply
into the differences of soul conditions existing between the
members of the human race. In respect to the right progress
for all mankind, it is certainly necessary that human beings
understand one another, that an element common to all men is
present. This common element, however, can only develop when
we focus on the varieties of soul dispositions and
developments that exist among the different members of
humanity. In an age of abstract thinking and mere
intellectualism such as the one in which we find ourselves,
people are only too prone to look only for the abstract
common denominators. Because of this they fail to arrive at
the actual concrete unity, for it is precisely by grasping
the differences that one comprehends the former. From any
number of viewpoints, I have referred in particular to the
mutual relationships resulting out of these differences
between the world's population of the West and East. Today, I
should like to point to such differentiations from yet
another standpoint.

When we look at
the obvious features of present general culture, what do we
actually find? The form taken by the thoughts of most people
in the civilized world really shows an essentially Western
coloring, something originating in the characteristic
tendencies of the West. Look at newspapers today that are
published in America or England, in France, Germany, Austria
or Russia. Although you will definitely sense certain
differences in the mode of thinking, and so on, you will also
notice one thing they have in common. If this is the Western
region here (see sketch), this the middle one and that the
Eastern, this common element, which comes to light
everywhere, say, in newspapers as well as in ordinary popular
literary and scientific publications, does not derive its
impulse from the depths of the national characteristics. In a
St. Petersburg paper, for instance, you do not find what
arises from the heritage of the Russian people. You do not
discover the heritage of Central European peoples by reading
a Viennese paper or one from Berlin. The element determining
the basic configuration and character (of all publications)
has basically arisen in the West, and then poured itself into
the individual regions. The fundamental coloring of what has
come to the fore from among the peoples of the West has,
therefore, essentially spread out over the civilized
world.

When things are
viewed superficially, one might doubt this; but if you go
more deeply into the matters under discussion here, you can
no longer doubt them. Consider the attitude, the basic
sentiment, the conceptual form, expressed in a newspaper from
Vienna or Berlin, or a literary or scientific work from
either city. Compare this with a publication from London
— quite aside from the language — and you will
discover that there is a greater similarity between the
publication from London and the book from Vienna, Paris, or
even New York or Chicago than there is between the present
thoughts and ideas in literary and scientific works from
Vienna and Berlin, and the special nuance which Fichte
[ Note 53 ]
for example, poured
into his thoughts as an enlivening element. I shall
demonstrate this to you by citing just one example.

There is a
saying by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the great philosopher who
was born at the turn of the nineteenth century, that is so
characteristic of him that no one today understands it. It
goes, “The external world is the substance of duty
become visible.” The sentence means nothing less than
this. When we look out into the world of mountains, clouds,
woods and rivers, of animals, plants and minerals, all this
is in itself something devoid of meaning, without reality, it
is merely a phenomenon. It is only there to enable the human
being in his evolution to fulfill his duty. For I could not
carry out my obligations in a world in which I would not be
surrounded by things that I could touch. There must be wood,
there must be a hammer. In itself, it has no significance and
no materiality. It is only the substance of my duty which has
become sense-perceptible. Everything outside exists primarily
for the purpose of bringing duty to light.

This saying was
coined by a man a century ago out of the innermost sentiments
of his soul and character as well as his folk spirit. It did
not become generally known. When people talk about Johann
Gottlieb Fichte today, when they write books about him and
mention him in newspaper articles, they only perceive the
external form of his words. No one really understands
anything about Fichte. You may take everything you find on
him today, either literary or scientific, but it has nothing
whatever to do with Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It does, however,
have a great deal to do with what arose out of the Western
folk spirit, and has spread over the rest of the civilized
world.

These more
delicate relationships are not discerned. That is the reason
why nobody even thinks of characterizing in a deep and
exhaustive manner the essential feature of what arises from
the spirit of the various nationalities. For it is all
inundated today by what arises from the West. In Central
Europe, in the East, people imagine that they are thinking
along their own ethnic lines. This is not the case, they
think in accordance with what they have adopted from the
West.

In what I am
now saying lies the key to much of what is really the riddle
of the present age. This riddle can be solved only when we
become aware of the specific qualities arising from the
various regions of the world. There is, first of all, the
East that today certainly offers us no true picture of
itself. If untruthfulness were not the underlying
characteristic of all public life in our time, the world
would not be so ignorant of the fact that what we call
Bolshevism is spreading rapidly throughout the East and into
Asia; that it has gone far already. People have a great
desire to sleep through the actual events, and are glad to be
kept in ignorance. It is therefore easy to withhold from them
what is really taking place. Thus, people will live to see
the East and the whole of Asia inundated by the most extreme,
radical product of Western thought, namely Bolshevism, an
element utterly foreign to these people.

If we wish to
look into what it is that the world of the East brings forth
out of the depths of its folk character, it becomes obvious
that it is possible to discover the fundamental nuance of
feeling in the East only by going back into earlier times and
learning through them. For, in regard to its original
character, the East has become completely decadent.
Forgetting its very nature, the East has allowed itself to be
inundated by what I have described as the most extreme,
radical offshoots of Western thought. Certainly, it is true
that what was once there is still living within Eastern
humanity, but today it is all covered up. What once lived in
the East, what once vibrated through Eastern souls, survives
in its final results where it is no longer understood, where
it has turned into a superstitious ritual, where it has
become the hypocritical murmurings of the popes of the
Orthodox Russian ritual, incomprehensible even to those who
believe they understand it. A direct line runs from ancient
India to these formulas of the Russian church ritual, which
are now only rattled off to the multitudes in the form of lip
service. For this whole inclination which thus expressed
itself, which bestowed on the Eastern soul its imprint and
also does so today in a suppressed form, is the potential for
developing a spiritual state of mind that guides the human
being towards the prenatal, to what exists in our life before
birth, before conception. In the very beginning, the nature
of what permeated the East as a world conception and
religious attitude was connected with the fact that this East
possessed a concept which has been completely lost to the
West. As I have said here before, the West has the concept of
immortality, not that of “not having been born,”
of “unbornness.” We have the word immortality, we
do not have the term “unbornness.” This implies
that in our thinking we continue life after death, but not
into the time before birth. On the other hand, the East
possessed that special soul inclination it had that still
included Imagination and Inspiration in its thoughts and
concepts. By means of this particular manner of expressing
the conceptual content of its soul world, the East was far
less predisposed to pay heed to the life after death than to
that before birth. In regard to the human being it viewed
life here in the sense world as something that comes to man
after he has received his tasks prior to birth, as something
that he has to absolve here in the sense of the task given
him. He was disposed to regard this life as a duty set human
beings by the gods before they descended into this earthly
body of flesh. It goes without saying that such a world
conception encompasses both repeated earth lives and the
lives between death and birth; for one can quite well speak
of a single life after death, but not of only one before
birth. That would be an impossible teaching. After all, one
who refers at all to pre-existence would then not speak of
one earth life only, which is something that should
be obvious to you upon reflection. It was the way they had of
looking up into the supersensory world, which was brought
about by the whole predisposition of these Eastern souls, but
it was one that focused their attention on the life we lead
between death and a new birth prior to being drawn down to
earthly life. Everything else, everything in the way of
political, social, historical and economical ideas was only
the consequence of what dwelt in the soul due to the
orientation towards the life between birth and
conception.

This life, this
mood of soul, is particularly fitted to turn the human soul's
gaze to the spiritual, to fill man with the super-sensible
world. For even here on earth, man considers himself entirely
a creation of the spiritual world, indeed, as a being who, in
the world of the senses, is merely pursuing his super-sensible
life. Everything that became decadent in later ages, the
establishment of kingdoms, the social structure of the
ancient Orient and its very constitution, developed from this
special underlying mood of soul. This soul condition might be
said today to be overpowered, because it became weak and
crippled, because it was only promulgated as if out of what I
would like to call “rachitic” soul members, as
for example, in the works of Rabindranath Tagore,
[ Note 54 ]
which are like something
that is poured into vague, nebulous formulas. In actual
practice, we are today inundated by what expresses itself in
Bolshevism as the most extreme, radical wing of Western
thinking. The West will have to experience that something it
did not wish to have for itself is moving over into the East,
that in a not very distant future, what the West pushed off
on the East will surge back upon it from there. This will
result in a strange kind of self-knowledge.

What has this
remarkable development in the East led to? It has led the
people of the East to employ the holy inner zeal they once
utilized to foster the impulse for the supersensory world and
to apprehend the spiritual in all its purity, to accept the
most materialistic view of outer life with religious fervor.
Even though Bolshevism is the most extreme consequence of the
most materialistic view of the world and social life, it
will, as it moves further into Asia, increasingly transform
itself into something that is received there with the same
religious zeal as was the spiritual world in former times. In
the East, people will speak of the economic life in the same
terminology once used to speak of the sacred Brahma. The
fundamental disposition of the soul does not change; it
endures, for it is not the content (of the soul) that matters
here. The most materialistic views can be approached with the
same fervor formerly used to grasp the most spiritual.

Let us now turn
and look at the West. The West has given rise to the human
soul's most recent development. It must be of special
interest to us because it has brought forth the view which,
rising like a mist, has since spread over the whole civilized
world. It is the manner of conception that already found, its
most significant expression in Francis Bacon and Hobbes; in
minds of more recent times, in the economist Adam Smith, for
example; among philosophers, in John Stuart Mill, and among
historians, in Buckle, and so on.
[ Note 55 ]
It is a form of thinking
that no longer contains any Imagination and Inspiration in
its conceptions and ideas, where the human being is dependent
on directing his conceptual life entirely outwards to the
sense world, absorbing the impressions of the latter
according to the associations of thoughts resulting from that
same world. This came to its most brilliant philosophical
expression in David Hume, also in other such as Locke.
[ Note 56 ]

There is
something very strange here that must, however, be mentioned.
When we focus on the West, we must pay heed to how minds like
John Stuart Mill, for example, speak of human thought
associations. The term “association of ideas” is
in fact a completely Western thought form, but in Central
Europe, for instance, it has been in such common use for more
than half a century that people speak of it as if it had
originated there. When psychology is taught in John Stuart
Mill's sense, one says, for instance, that in the human soul,
thoughts first connect themselves by means of one thought
embracing another, or by one thought attaching itself to
another, or by one permeating another. This implies that
people look upon the thought world and view the individual
thoughts as they would little spheres that relate themselves
to each other (see drawing). To be consistent one would have
to eliminate everything to do with the ego and astral body,
inwardly referring only to a mere thought mechanism,
something that a great number of people do, in fact, speak
of. The soul of man is disemboweled, as it were. When you
read a book by John Stuart Mill with its deductive and
inductive logic, you feel as if you were mentally placed in a
dissecting room where a number of animals hang that are
having their innards taken out. Likewise, in the way Mill
proceeds, one feels as if man's soul-spiritual being were
disemboweled. He first empties the human being of everything
within, leaving only the outer sheath. Then, thoughts do,
indeed, appear only like so many associated atomistic
formations that coalesce when we form an opinion. The tree is
green. Here “green” is the one thought,
“tree” is the other, and the two flow together.
The inner being is no longer alive; it has been disemboweled
and only the thought mechanism remains.

This manner of
conceiving of things is not derived from the sense world; it
is imposed upon it. In my book,
The Riddles of Philosophy,
[ Note 57 ]
I have drawn attention to how a mind such as John Stuart Mill's
is in no way related to the inner world; it is simply given
to behaving like a mere onlooker in whom the external world
is reflected. Our concern here is that this method of
thinking brings about what I have often described as the
tragedy of materialism, which is that it no longer
comprehends matter. For how can materialism fathom the nature
of matter — and we have seen that, by going deeply into
the human being, one penetrates into the true material
element of the earth — if it first eliminates in
thought what actually represents matter? In this regard, an
extreme consequence already has been reached.

This extreme
consequence could easily be traced today if it were not for
the fact that people never look at the whole context of
things, only at the details. Imagine where it must lead if
all the actual inner flexible aspects of the ego are
eliminated, if the human being is emptied of the very element
that can enlighten him in the sense world concerning the
spirit. Just think, where must this finally lead? It must
result in the human being feeling that he no longer has
anything of the actual content of the world. He looks outside
at the sense world without realizing the truth of what we
said yesterday, namely, that behind the external world of the
senses there are spiritual beings. When he gives himself up
to illusions, he assumes that atoms and molecules exist
outside. He dreams of atoms and molecules. If man has no
illusion concerning the external world, he can say nothing
but that the whole outer world contains no truth, that it
really is nothing. Inwardly, on the other hand, he has found
nothing; he is empty. He must talk himself into believing
that there is something inside him. He has no grasp of the
spirit; therefore, he suggests spirit to himself, developing
the suggestion of spirit. He is not capable of maintaining
this suggestion without rigorously denying the reality of
matter. This implies that he accommodates himself to a world
view which does not perceive the spirit but only suggests it,
merely persuading itself into the belief of spirit, while
denying matter. You find the most extreme Western exponent of
this in Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science
[ Note 58 ]
as the counterpart of what I
described just now for the East. This was bound to arise as
the final outcome of such conceptions as those of Locke,
David Hume or John Stuart Mill. Christian Science as a
concept is, however, also the final consequence of what has
been brought about in recent times by the unfortunate
division of man's soul life into knowledge and faith.

Once people
start restricting themselves to knowledge on one side and
faith on the other, a faith that no longer even tries to be
knowledge, this leads in the end to their not having the
spirit at all. Faith finally ceases to have a content. Then,
people must suggest a content to themselves. They make no
attempt to reach the genuine spirit through a spiritual
science. In their search for the spirit, they arrive at Mrs.
Eddy's Christian Science, this spirit which has come to
expression there as the final consequence. The politics of
the West have for some time been breathing this
spirit. It does not sustain itself on realities; it lives on
self-made suggestions. Naturally, when it is not a matter of
an in-depth cure, one can even effect cures with Christian
Science, as has been reported, and accounts are given of its
marvelous cures. Likewise, all kinds of edifying results can
be achieved with the West's politics of suggestion.

Yet, this
Western concept possesses certain qualities, qualities of
significance. We can best understand them when we contrast
them with those of the East. On looking back to the ages when
the Eastern qualities came especially to the fore, we find
that they were those which, first of all, were capable of
focusing the soul's eye on the prenatal life. They were
therefore preeminently fitted to constitute what can
represent the spiritual part, the spiritual world, in a
social organism. Fundamentally speaking, all that we have
created in Central Europe and the West is in a certain sense
the legacy of the East. I have already mentioned this on
another occasion. The East was particularly predisposed to
cultivate the spiritual life. The West, on the other hand, is
especially talented at developing thought forms. I have just
described them in a somewhat unfavorable light. They can,
however, be depicted in a favorable light as well, namely, if
we consider all that has originated with Bacon of Verulam,
Buckle, Mill, Thomas Reid, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Spencer,
and others of like mind, for example, Bentham.
[ Note 59 ]
On the one hand, we admit
that these thought forms are certainly not suited to
penetrate into a spiritual world by means of Imagination and
Inspiration, to comprehend the life before birth. Yet, on the
other hand, we are obliged to say, particularly when one
studies how this manner of thinking has pervaded and lives in
our Western science, that all this is especially appropriate
for economic thinking; and one day, when the economic life of
the social organism will have to be developed, we shall have
to become students of Western thought, of Thomas Reid, John
Stuart Mill, Buckle, Adam Smith, and the rest. They have only
made the mistake of applying their form of thinking to
science, to epistemology, and the spiritual life. This
thinking is in order when we train ourselves by means of it
and reflect on how to form associations, how best to manage
the economy. Mill should not have written a book on logic;
the spiritual capacity he applied to doing this should have
been used for describing in detail the configuration of a
given industrial association. We must realize that when
anyone today wishes to produce a book such as my
Towards Social Renewal,
it is necessary for him to have learned
to understand in what manner one attains to the spiritual
sphere in the Oriental sense, and in what manner —
although following a much more erratic path — one
arrives at economic thinking in the West. For both directions
belong together and are necessary to one another.

As far as a
view of life is concerned, this Western thinking then does
lead to pseudo-sciences like the one by Mrs. Eddy, her
Christian Science. We must not, however, look at matters
according to what they cannot be, but consider what
they can be. For unity must come about through the
cooperation of all human beings on earth, not by some
abstract, theoretical structure of ideas that is simply laid
down, and then viewed as a unity.

At this point,
one may ask from where in the human organization this
particular thinking of Mill, Buckle, and Adam Smith
originates. We find that Oriental thinking has basically
arisen from a contact with the world, especially when looking
back to the more ancient forms of Oriental philosophy. It is
a thinking, a feeling, which gives the impression that, out
of the earth itself, the roots of a tree grow and produce
leaves. In just this way, the ancient Indian, for example,
seems to us to be united with the whole earth; his thoughts
appear to us to have grown out of earthly existence in a
spiritual manner, just as a tree's leaves and blossoms appear
to have grown out of it by means of all the forces of the
earth.

It is precisely
this attachment to the external world in the Oriental person,
the absorption of the spirituality, that I have referred to
as lying beyond the sense world. In the West, everything is
brought out of the instincts, the depth of the personality
— I might say, from man's metabolic system, not the
external world. For the Oriental, the world works upon both
his senses and Spirit, kindling within him what he calls his
holy Brahma. In the West, we have what arises from the body's
metabolism and leads to associations of ideas; it is
something that is particularly suited to characterize the
economic life, something that does not apply until the next
earth incarnation. For, with the exception of the head, what
we bear as our physical organism is something that does not
find its true expression, as we have outlined, until the
following life on earth. We have been given our head from our
previous earth life; our limbs and our metabolic system are
Borne by us into the next earthly incarnation. This is a
metamorphosis from one life on earth to the next. Hence, in
the West, people think with something that only becomes
mature in the following earth life. For this reason, Western
thinking is particularly predisposed to focus on the life
after death, to speak of immortality, not of eternity, not to
know the term, “unbornness,” but only the word,
“immortality.” It is the West which represents
life after death as something that the human being should
above all else be concerned about. Yet, even now, something I
might call radical, but in a radical sense something noble,
is preparing itself in the West out of the totally
materialistic culture. One with the faculty to look a little
more deeply into what is thus trying to evolve makes a
strange discovery. Although people strive in the most
intimate way for life after death, for some kind of
immortality, hence, for an egotistic life after death, they
strive in such a manner that, out of this effort, something
special will develop. While a large part of humanity still
harbors an illusion in this regard, something quite
remarkable is, oddly enough, developing in the West. Since
individual elements of the ideas concerning life after death
being developed by the West are reflected to a certain extent
in a great majority of Europeans, they, too, have especially
perfected this preoccupation with the postmortem life. The
European, however, would prefer to say, “Well, my
religion promises me a life after death, but in this
transitory, unsatisfactory, merely material earth life I need
make no effort to secure the immortality of my soul. Christ
died to make me immortal; I need not strive for immortality.
It is mine once and for all; Christ makes me immortal.”
— or something to that effect.

In the West,
particularly in America, something different is preparing
itself. Out of the most diverse, occasionally the most
bizarre and trivial religious world conceptions, we see
something trying to arise which, although it has quite
materialistic forms, is nevertheless connected with.
something that will be a part of life in the future,
particularly in regard to this world-view of immortality.
Among certain sects in America, the belief is prevalent that
one cannot survive at all after death if one has made no
effort in this earthly life, if one has not accomplished
something whereby one acquires this life after death. A
judgment concerning good and evil is envisioned after death
that does not merely follow the pattern of earthly truth. He
who makes no effort here on earth to bear through the portals
of death what he has developed in his soul will be diffused
and scattered in the cosmic all. What a person wishes to
carry with him through death must be developed here. A man
dies the second death of the soul — to use the saying
of Paul — who does not provide here for his soul to
become immortal. This is something that is definitely
developing in the West as a world concept in place of the
leisurely, passive, awaiting what will happen after death. It
is something that is emerging in certain American sects.
Perhaps today it is still little noticed, but there is a
great deal of feeling in favor of viewing life here in a
moral sense, and to arrange the conduct of life in such a
manner that by means of what one does here, something is
carried through the gate of death.

As I said, in
the East, the particular attention to the life before birth
developed long ago. This made it possible for life on earth
to be viewed as a continuation of this prenatal, supersensory
life in the spirit. Earthly life thus received its content,
not out of itself, but out of the spiritual life. In the
West, an attitude is developing today for the future that
will have nothing to do with a passive, indifferent life of
waiting here for death because the life beyond is guaranteed;
instead, the knowledge is growing that man carries nothing
through the portal of death unless care is taken on earth to
make something out of what one already has here.

Thus, Western
thinking is adapted, on the one hand, to organizing economic
matters within the social organism; on the other hand, it is
suited to develop further the one-sided doctrine of life
after death. This is why spiritualism has had a special
opportunity for developing in the West, and from there, could
invade the rest of the world. After all, spiritualism was
only devised to give a sort of guarantee of immortality to
those who could no longer attain to any conviction concerning
immortality by means of any kind of inner development. For,
in most instances, a person actually becomes a spiritualist
in order to receive by some means or the other the certain
guarantee that he is immortal ,after death.

Between these
two worlds lies something that is implied in Fichte's words,
“The external world is the substance of my duty become
visible.” As I said before, people really have no
understanding for this mode of thinking, and what is written
today about Fichte could well be compared to what a blind man
might say about color. Particularly in the last few years, a
tremendous amount of talking and lecturing has been done
about this saying by Fichte, but it was all accomplished in
such a way that one is disposed to say that Fichte, that
out-and-out Central European mind, has really been
americanized by the German newspapers and writers of
literature. One is confronted with americanized versions of
Fichte. There, we find the nuance of human soul life which,
in a special way, is supposed to develop the middle member of
the social organism, the one that arises from the
relationship of man to man. It would be of benefit if some of
you would for once make an in-depth study — it isn't
easy — of one of Fichte's writings where he speaks as
though nature did not exist at all. Duty, for example, and
everything else is deduced by first proving that external
human beings actually exist in whom the materialized
substance of duty can become reality. Here, all the raw
material is contained, so to speak, from which the rights and
state organism of the threefold social order have to be put
together.

What, then, is
the actual cause of the catastrophic events in the past few
years? The basic reason is that there was no living
perception, no feeling, for such matters. Berlin's policies
are American. This is fine for America, but it is not
suitable for Berlin. This is why Berlin's politics amount to
nothing. For, just imagine, since American policies were
constantly carried out in Berlin or Vienna, we could just as
well have called Berlin, New York, apart from the difference
in language, and Vienna, Chicago for all the difference there
would have been otherwise. When, in Central Europe, something
is done that is completely foreign to it, something
originating in the West where it has its rightful place, then
the primal essence of the folk spirit is aroused and gives it
the lie without the people being aware of it. This was
basically the case in recent decades. This was the underlying
phenomenon of what happened, the phenomenon that consists,
for instance, in the fact that people have trampled Goethe's
thinking underfoot, and as another example, have read Ralph
Waldo Trine
[ Note 60 ]
out of a sort of instinct. Actually, all our aristocratic dandies
in politics have shown an interest in Trine, and received their
special inner stimulus or whatever from that direction. When
affairs came to the boiling point, they even turned to
Woodrow Wilson;
[ Note 61 ]
and he
[ Note 62 ]
who would now again like to be President of the German Republic
still has that frame of mind that allows his brain automatically
to roll out Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. Thus, in recent
times, in the Grand Duchy of Baden, we experienced how a
formerly truly representative German personality spouted
forth americanisms. This is the best and most immediate
example of how matters really stand at present. Indeed, we
must be able to see through these archetypal phenomena if we
wish to understand what is actually happening today. If we
merely pick up a newspaper and read Prince Max von Baden's
speeches, simply studying them out of context, then this is
something absolutely worthless today. It is a mere
kaleidoscope of words. Only when we are able to place such
things into the whole context of the world can we hope to
understand anything about the world. No progress can be made
until people realize how necessary it is today that world
understanding be acquired if one wishes to have a say. The
most characteristic sign of the time is the belief that when
a group of individuals have set up some trashy proposition as
a general program — such as the unity of all men
regardless of race, nation or color, and so
forth — something has been accomplished. Nothing has been
accomplished except to throw sand into people's eyes.
Something real is attained only when we note the differences
and realize what world conditions are. Formerly, human beings
could live in accordance with their instincts. This is no
longer possible; they must learn to live consciously. This
can be done only by looking deeply into what is actually
happening.

The East was
supreme in regard to life before birth and repeated earthly
lives that are connected with it. The greatness of the West
consisted in its disposition in regard to life after death.
Here, in the middle (see drawing an next page), the actual
science of history has originated, although today it is as
yet misunderstood. Take Hegel
[ Note 63 ]
as an example. In Hegel's
works, we have neither preexistence nor postexistence; there
is neither life before birth nor after death, but there is a
spirited grasp of history. Hegel begins with logic, goes from
there to a philosophy of nature, develops his doctrine of the
soul, then that of the state, and ends with the triad of art,
religion and science. They are his world content. There is no
mention of preexistence or an immortal soul, only of the
spirit that lives here in this world.

Preexistence,
postexistence — this is really life in the present
state of mankind, the permeation of history. Read what has
been drawn up particularly by Hegel as a philosophy of
history. In libraries, one generally finds the pages of his
books still uncut! Not many editions have appeared of Hegel's
works. In the eighties of the last century, Eduard von Hartmann
[ Note 64 ]
wrote that in all of Germany, where twenty universities exist that
have faculties of philosophy, no more than two of the
instructors had read Hegel! What he said could not be
refuted; it was true. Nonetheless, it hardly needs to be said
that all the students were ready to swear to what they had
been told about Hegel by professors who had never read him.
Do familiarize yourselves with his work and you will find
that here, in fact, historical conception has come about, the
experience of what goes on between human beings. There you
also find the material from which the state, the rights
sphere of the threefold social organism, has to be created.
We can learn about the constitution of the spiritual organism
from the Orient; the constitution of the economic sphere is
to be learned from the West.

In this way, we
have to look into the differentiations of humanity all over
the whole earth, and can gain an understanding of the matter
from one side or the other. If the goal is approached
directly, namely, if the social life is studied, one arrives
at the threefold order as developed in my book,
Towards Social Renewal.
By thus studying the life of mankind
throughout the earth, we come to the realization that there
is one part with a special disposition for the economy; there
is another with a special aptitude for organizing the state;
and yet another with a specific inclination towards the
spiritual life. A threefold structure can then be created by
taking the actual economy from the West, the state from the
Middle, and from the East — naturally in a renewed form,
as I have often said — the spiritual life. Here you
have the state, here the economic life and here the spiritual
life (see above sketch); the two others have to be taken
across from here. In this way, all humanity has to work
together, for the origins of these three members of the
social organism are found in different regions of the earth,
and therefore must be kept properly apart everywhere. If, in
the old manner, human beings wish to mix up in a unified
state what is striving to be threefold, nothing will result
from it except that in the West the state will be a unity
where the economic life overwhelms the whole, and everything
else is only submerged into it. If the theorists then take
hold of and study the matter, meaning, if Karl Marx moves
from Germany to London, he then concludes that everything
depends on the economic life. If Marx's insanity triumphs,
the three spheres are reduced to one, the one being of a
purely economic character. If one limits oneself to what
wishes to be merely the state or rights configuration, one
apes the economic life of the West, which for decades has
been fashioning an illusory structure, which then naturally
collapses when a catastrophe occurs — something that
has indeed happened!

The Orient,
which possesses the spiritual life in a weakened state in the
first place, simply has adopted the economic life from the
West and has inoculated itself with something that is
completely alien to it. When these matters are studied, we
shall see particularly that blessings can only fall upon the
earth when, everywhere, one gathers together into the
threefold social organism through human activity what by its
very nature develops in the various regions.